Small, lightweight headsets for communications usage have been known for many years. A large proportion of such headsets currently are of the post-auricle type, i.e., having a housing or capsule which fits behind the ear of the wearer, the capsule containing at least a microphone and sometimes also a receiver. Various acoustic tube arrangements are employed to pick up the wearer's speech from a location near his mouth and convey it to the microphone; and to convey receiver sounds to the wearer's auditory canal. Examples of such post-auricle headsets are those shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,548,118 to Hutchings, and U.S. Pat. No. 4,335,281 to Scott, et al.
In the headset industry, there has been a fairly consistent trend toward the use of ever smaller and lighter components, in an effort to make headsets more comfortable during long periods of use, such as encountered by telephone operators, reservations personnel, aircraft crews, etc. Accompanying this trend have been the ever-present considerations of stability and versatility. With regard to stability, the problem centers around keeping the headset in a fixed position on the wearer's head, so that sound volume will not be adversely affected due to shifting of the location of the open end of the voice tube away from the wearer's mouth, and so that the wearer will not have the disconcerting feeling of movement of the unit on his ear, and the accompanying sense of the unit being about to fall off. With regard to versatility, a major design consideration centers around being able to locate the open end of the voice tube at a point close to the corner of the wearer's mouth, while at the same time being able to wear the headset alternately on either side of the head.